Adultism in Canada and the Indigenous Democratic Alternative

Abstract Democracy is a fraught concept in the realm of Indigenous politics. In its western, state-centric forms, it is used to justify colonial and imperialist violence across the globe. While in some of its earliest Indigenous forms, it constitutes a way of being that rejects constitutions of violence and fosters care-centric world-building. Oppression of children (adultism) is taken for granted in western democracies, while many Indigenous nations have children embedded within their legal and political structures for governance, as critical, if not central political agents. In this article I argue that the oppression of children is an overlooked distinction between Indigenous and western democracies and that the centering of children in human governance demonstrates an ontological alternative that provokes new possibilities for emergent non-state democracies.